Mutual Fund News Roundup: November 14

Staying on top of the most important mutual fund news is important for investors. Below, we highlight some recently reported mutual fund-focused news.

According to Reuters and Morningstar, BlackRock reported its October inflows for bond funds, which came in at $5.2 billion – the highest figure since May 1998. On the other side of the coin, Pimco reported that its open-ended funds saw $48.3 billion in outflows for the month. For September, Pimco saw outflows of $25.5 billion, following the news that fund manager Bill Gross was leaving the company.

Matthew McLennan, who runs First Eagle Global Fund Class A, and manages over $101 billion, told MSNBC that some of his top picks right now are Microsoft, National Oilwell Varco and Intel. McLennan said the following on CNBC’s “Halftime Report”: “What matters to us is persistence to cash flow rather than price-to-concept, and big companies like Microsoft or Oracle—two of our biggest tech holdings, for example—they generate oodles of cash flow, they buy back stock and these companies like Microsoft, they have dividend yields close to 3 percent.”

In an interview with ThinkAdvisor, fund manager Robert Rodriguez, who is the managing partner and strategic advisor of First Pacific Advisors, said he believes we will see a steep pullback in the markets by 2018.

In the interview, Rodriguez states that much of the “earnings growth is being driven by a fair amount of financial engineering on the part of the Federal Reserve and corporations,” and that markets in 2015 will be 20% or 30% lower. We encourage you to read the entire five-page interview with Rodriguez here.

Eaton Vance announced this week that the company has gotten approval from the SEC to introduce a new sort of non-transparent ETFs. Eaton Vance is calling them “exchange traded managed funds,” or ETMFs, and the main difference with these funds is that they will not disclose their holdings daily, and their prices will be directly linked to the fund’s next-determined daily net asset value. Eaton Vance plans to launch 18 of these funds under the brand “NextShares.”